This is the exact logical flip-side of not being able to sign away your various rights, a policy that much (not all) of/. seems to be strongly in favor of.

For instance, in this case, there's no legal structure ('merican here) that would allow Samsung to propose that you can keep your phone in exchange for a waiver of liability for the defects in the product. So basically, the claim of "I want to own my device" implies that (a) you can turn down their request to swap it for a non-exploding device and (b) they are still liable if it explodes and kills a schoolbus full of kids.

No sane company would agree to that arrangement.

[ Or to put it another way, they can't stipulate that it's not a phone now but a fire-starter brick whose intended function is to explode. That's not how product liability law works. And we have to understand that by placing non-dischargeable legal responsibilities onto companies, we have changed the relationship between the company and the consumer. For the better, I think -- the world was much worse in the era of caveat emptor. ]

If the tickets are being sold for $60, but people are willing to pay $150, then why aren't they offered first for $150? I see the big problem being the middlemen sucking money out without adding value. Let the entertainers get that money.

I agree that the entertainers should get a cut of the excess value. At the same time, there are other non-monetary factors that entertainers also want out of their performances. First, they want to keep their fan base engaged in the long term, which is easier if ordinary fans believe they can score tickets. Having tickets that are auctioned off to the highest bidder is bad for their image. They would rather have a third party gouge the customers than be perceived as money-grubbers -- what's an extra few million.

The second is that, frankly, folks that pay a ton of money for shows tend to be more passive observers. I'm not sure if it's directly due to paying more and thus not thinking they need to contribute more, but Kid Rock did a cool thing where the first few rows were reserved for randomly-selected folks from the $20 GA. You can bet that those people were stoked!

Roku and Apple send Facebook, and anyone else that cares the pay, the information on what you are streaming, along with your IP and whatever else they care to send. Facebook then uses that information to send an ad to you.

Exactly wrong. It's not the device-side that's selling out your privacy at all.

--User points his media player (e.g. Roku) at some streaming service (e.g. A&E). As a result, A&E knows the IP address that is requesting streaming video.

--Streaming service shares data with some other party (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) using this IP as an identifier

--Other party correlates those IPs with the IPs making requests against its services and makes decisions (e.g. ads) based on that.

It is a fundamental part of the design of the internet (as it exists today) that two different service providers can cross-correlate requests based on a semi-stable* identifier (IP) if they chose to share data. There's literally nothing the client application can do to remedy this, it's in the network-layer. You can try to fix this at the network layer with some multi-VPN setup (not just a VPN, one that assigns a different external IP to each outgoing request) but that's sort of not how the internet was designed to work. The internet was designed to be sort-of pseudonymous, but it was not designed with true anonymity (in the sense of having no identifiers) in mind.

If you want a meatspace analogy, this is like two different dead-tree newspapers comparing their subscribers for home addresses. You want the newspapers to end up on your driveway in the morning, so you either have to give them your home address or use a different PO Box for each newspaper (which seems expensive).

[*] Yes, IPs are not really stable identifiers. But within the timespan of a few hours/days, it's good enough to get a few extra ad views. In other words, the downside of using a stale/incorrect identifier here (multiple parties on the same IP, router rebooted and got a new DHCP) is pretty low -- they show an irrelevant ad to those folks.

In my high school cafeteria, half an hour from the bridge south into the US, they accepted US currency—at a 1:1 exchange rate with the Canadian dollar. It was considered something of a faux pas. Generally people here will tell you to go to a bank.

When a photovoltaic cell collects energy from a Photon, is does not absorb the whole photon, it only increases it's wavelength and re-emits it; basically converting regular light into infrared light.

While the regular light bouncing of a simple white roof could leave the atmosphere, taking it's excess energy with it, the now infrared light gets trapped by the greenhouse effect, heating the atmosphere.

Brexit prevents most EU military cooperation so this supply failure seriously weakens British power.

Spot on for the rest of the comment, but I think NATO is still alive and well (OK, maybe Trump something, for now I haven't the foggiest what he'll do with NATO and I'm betting he doesn't either) and is the primary conduit for military cooperation amongst the European states.

In any event, Brexit,Natexit or otherwise, EADS isn't going to be split apart.

y thought on it is that if the nation went to war in which naval battles were a possibility (or actually happening), the budget would be instantaneously available to them to do whatever necessary to protect their seas. I'm sure they also have a rather large stockpile they could draw on in the meantime as well

Where is this stockpile going to come from if you don't develop, test, build and train with it in advance?

And how is the budget going to help when you've got a lead time in years to get something through the pipeline? I know PHBs are fond of the idea they can have 9 women make a baby in a month by throwing money at her, but that's just not how it works.

Which is of course not true if "own it" means "access data encrypted with a strong key and a non-trivial-to-brute-force password".

And of course this vulnerability gives you root access in the initramfs, but no access to any of the LUKS protected drives. At best, it's an easier way to perform an Evil Maid Attack, but we already knew that about whole disk encryption.

So really this is just about making it much more convenient to perform an attack that we already knew was feasible (feasible here means not something that can be protected against cryptographically). In the final analysis, only a fully trusted boot path (in some flavor or another) will actually solve that problem.

It's not about modern hardware, it's about hardware with a particular TDP. The engineering choices around the design and the weight/thermal/battery performance gave a certain wattage to be divvied up amongst the components. Maybe you don't like the particular tradeoffs they made, but that's not "bad design".

Those other laptops running Nvidia 10-series chipsets made different tradeoffs. Some are heavier (I saw some on Newegg for 5.5lbs, the MBP is 4.5lbs), some consume battery quicker or take longer to charge. They just picked different points along the power/performance/thermal tradeoff space.

You might as well say a sedan is not a good design because the transmission and tires cannot handle the torque from a sports car engine. Sure you could upgrade the transmission and the tires and the engine, but then you're just asking for a different car entirely.

I understand that Hilary (& Gore) got more votes in the existing contest. But that was in a contest where it was decided in advance that there was a different method of deciding the winner, which in turn informed the campaigns' strategies. In the counterfactual case that it was known well in advance that the contest was going to be decided by popular vote, the campaigns would have adopted different strategies and the outcome of the PV might well have been different. Would Hilary have won that one too? Maybe! Could Trump have won? Maybe!

You can speculate about those maybes and even make an attempt to quantify them. Fundamentally though, it's fundamentally a wrong to state that because Hilary won the PV in an EC race that she would have won the PV in a PV race.